GOP youth 'evolve' on gay marriage

As the Supreme Court takes up same-sex marriage on Tuesday, a growing number of young Republicans are waving the white flag in the culture war over gay weddings — with many opting to focus on economic issues instead.

That shift is evident among conservative youth from GOP college activists to young right-leaning Beltway pundits to heartland churchgoers under 30, political and religious leaders say.

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Mike Allen on the GOP's possible gay marriage shift

Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told POLITICO that young members of his community are no longer interested in vocalizing opposition to same-sex marriage.

“Basically, they just don’t think it’s something we want to talk about,” said Land, who strongly opposes same-sex marriage. “[They say,] ‘It feels intolerant. We believe what we believe, they have a right to what they want to believe. Marriage should be a church thing, not a legal thing.’”

Polls have shown that overall, Americans have grown increasingly accepting of gay marriage in recent years.

That is also true among young Republicans: In 2007-2008, 70 percent of Republicans ages 18-29 opposed gay marriage and 25 percent supported it, according to figures from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Compare those numbers with a Pew survey released last week, which found that nearly 40 percent of Republicans in that age group support same-sex marriage.

“Clearly it’s all Americans in a certain age bandwidth,” Fred Sainz, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, told POLITICO. “So among Republican youth … it’s not an issue they spend an awful lot of time thinking about. So for us, the issue, it’s really become, at least among that generation, of ‘when,’ not ‘if.’”

Whether or not young Republicans are thinking about gay marriage, they’re not doing much talking about it on campuses, said Sam Bain, the state chair for the Ohio College Republican Federation. It’s been a “long while” since he’s seen much activism promoting what he calls traditional marriage among college-aged Republicans, he said.

College Republicans are “predominantly focused on economic issues, whether it’s the national debt or finding jobs after graduation,” said Bain, 24, who has been in state leadership for the past three years. “There really wasn’t talk of marriage on either side [among young Republicans during the election].”

Bain, who served on the board of a youth advisory group for Mitt Romney during the past election, told POLITICO that he has a “pretty good handle on what my chapters are doing,” and noted that “across the board in Ohio,” the economy is central to the conversation — far surpassing social issues.

“That’s not to say we don’t have students who … care about that marriage issue, but it wasn’t the time for it in the 2012 election the way the economy is and was,” he said, saying students worry about finding jobs post-graduation and wonder whether they’ll see their Social Security contributions again. “If it was 2004, we’d probably be talking about it all the time. But it’s not.”